In 2003 Dr David Kelly was found dead in the woods. Caught in a political vortex, Dr Kelly had been forced to appear before a televised government committee investigating whether he had accused British government figures of planting in a dossier the questionable claim that WMDs could be unleashed from Iraq in 45 minutes. The Hutton Inquiry concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life. But did he? This blog takes a closer look....
Contact: RowenaThursby@onetel.com

Thursday, August 31, 2006

August 31, 2006New weapons cover-up revealed...It has been revealed today that weapons inspector and former senior Australian diplomat Dr John Gee, resigned from the Iraq Survey Group in 2004, warning in a six-page letter to foreign minister Alexander Downer that he had no faith in the integrity of the weapons searching process (see below). The Iraq Survey Group's activities were, in his view, to all intents and purposes determined by the CIA. Trusted sources informed him that orders were issued that his letter was not to be circulated outside Downer's department.

In the same year, John Scarlett of Britain's MI6, pressed hard for 'nine nuggets' to be inserted into the Iraq Survey Group's final report. Gee's colleague, weapons inspector Rod Barton said:

'I couldn't believe it,'.... 'He was suggesting dragging things from a previous report [that the ISG had been found to be false] to use them to, well, "sex it up". It was an attempt to make our report appear to imply that maybe there were still WMD out there. I knew he had been responsible for your [government's] dossier and then I realised he was trying to do the same thing.'

It is instructive to observe how attempts to 'sex up' dossiers and reports continued long after Dr Kelly's death on 17/18 July 2003. Had Dr Kelly lived to supervise the Iraq Survey Group's activities out in Iraq during a visit planned for 26 July 2003, it would have been much more difficult to pursue that line.

Rowena ThursbyRowenaThursby@onetel.comKelly Investigation GroupIf you have further important information tel: 01425 638409 or 01425 620297

THE Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, issued instructions to suppress a damning letter about the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the war, a former senior diplomat says.

Dr John Gee, an expert on chemical weapons, worked with the US-led weapons hunter, the Iraq Survey Group, after the war and wrote the critical six-page letter when he decided to resign in March 2004. In it he warned the Federal Government the hunt was, "fundamentally flawed" and there was a "reluctance on the part of many here and in Washington to face the facts" that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Gee recorded in an email soon after that "Downer has issued instructions it [my letter] is not to be distributed to anyone". He wrote to a colleague in the Iraq Survey Group that a senior official in the Office of National Assessments, the Prime Minister's intelligence advisory agency, had told him about Mr Downer's instructions.

In another email, Dr Gee said the head of the Defence Department, Ric Smith, told him the department did not receive a copy of the letter even though Dr Gee was working in Iraq under contract to it. Dr Gee said senior defence officials told him the Department of Foreign Affairs "had not passed the letter on to Defence".

Last night, a spokesman for Mr Downer said the minister "did not recall" receiving Dr Gee's letter but said he would check. But he described as "a conspiracy theory" material showing that the letter had not been given to the head of the Defence Department. "I have heard a lot of conspiracy theories over the years, but I have not heard that one before."

However, documents given to the Herald, including Dr Gee's resignation letter and his emails to another senior weapons inspector, Rod Barton, reveal serious efforts to contain his findings.Mr Downer has previously admitted that he was briefed personally by Dr Gee on the expert's return from Iraq. But Mr Downer has never revealed the contents of that briefing. From the emails, it appears Mr Downer received the damning findings months before he and the Prime Minister, John Howard, accepted that no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.One month after his briefing with Dr Gee, Mr Downer met the US head of the Iraq Survey Group, Dr Charles Duelfer. At their press conference, Mr Downer insisted the weapons hunt in Iraq "was still a work in progress" and he could not draw conclusions.But Dr Gee's emails reveal he briefed every senior level of the Government, including the Prime Minister's office, Defence and Mr Downer's Iraq Task Force, upon his return from Baghdad. They also indicate Mr Downer knew of his letter. The letter stated: "I now believe that there are no WMD in Iraq and that while the ISG has found a number of research activities … it has found no evidence so far on ongoing WMD programs of the type I had assumed would be there."

Summing up his difficulties in Baghdad, Dr Gee wrote: "I have concluded that the process here is fundamentally flawed …"

He wrote that the Iraq Survey Group was "run by the CIA to protect the CIA".According to one email, the defence chief, Mr Smith, on hearing the briefing, said: "So we've got a problem." Mr Smith told him "the only way to deal with bad news is to deal with it promptly and get it out of the way".

Despite this, when Dr Gee tried to hand defence officials a copy of his letter, they declined to take it.

Yesterday Mr Barton, who also resigned from the hunt, told the Herald that Mr Downer and Mr Howard should have raised his and Dr Gee's complaints about the Iraq Survey Group with the US.

"When the two senior Australians quit, and make it plain why they quit, because the process was corrupt, I think the least the Government could do was to go and talk to the Americans and ask what was going on here".

5 comments:

In response to my question: why did Dr Gee take two years to reveal the suppression of the content of his letter? a cyber-colleague wrote:

'....perhaps Dr John Gee recognises that the same old story, that of fabricated evidence of WMD in Iraq, is now happening all over again in regards to Iran. And he has seen the result of his failure to insist his 6 page memo was taken note of and acted upon - the illegality of the fabricated justification that has allowed our nation to wage an aggressive war without provocation and caused the death of maybe as may as 100,000 innocent civilians.

He, along with so many other culpable so called experts, allowed the CIA and others to suppress the truth so to forward the mandate expressed in the Project for the New American Century's reports Rebuilding Americas Defences. http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

In UK law (as far as I know and I guess the law is much the same in Australia) there is no obligation to report crime to law enforcement bodies. But section 4 of the Criminal Law Act 1967 makes it an offence "for any person knowing or believing another person to be guilty of an arrestable offence to do, without lawful authority or reasonable excuse, any act with intent to impede their apprehension or prosecution." In other words perhaps Dr John Gee has legal reasons for making it clear he has not carried out any act intended to impede prosecution of those guilty of an illegal act.'

There is some info on the request by John Scarlett to the Australian weapons inspector, Dr. Rod Barton, to 'sex up' an ISG report on Iraq's WMD's recorded in the Westminster Hall debate of July 19th 2006 (secured by Norman Baker) here